Real Punks Get More Reviews

Two more reviews of Real Punks Don't Wear Black (both really great):

Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black

Willing to be seduced by this silly woman

I Am 36% Emo

Okay, so my sisters listen to this one song that kinda makes fun of Emos. That's okay. But still, I think they think it's such a bad thing. I think that they think Emos (short for emotional) have the 'hair', 'clothes', etc. They think people are Emo when they look at someone they've never met.

If guys wear tight jeans they're emo. What the heck?

Ya, I'm emotional, so what? Does that mean i cut myself? NO!

i know that they're just joking, but they're joking in a way that seems to me they're bashing Emo's a lot.

Gragh.
--from a friend of mine's MySpace blog (she's 11-years-old)

Sometime in the '90s or earlier, "emo" went - without my noticing at all (honest to God, I didn't even hear the term until 1999) - from being an attribute of music to being a subgenre of alternative rock. [EDIT: Er, more like sometime in the mid '80s. Shows how on top of things I am.] And sometime in the teenworld '00s the term went from being an attribute of people to being a social class like "skater" and "goth," and it now (or several years ago) seems to have crossed the threshold into being the crucial social term in white U.S. teendom. Or that's what my ignorant and distant appraisal of MySpace is telling me.

( How emo are you? )

Btw, where Mary Gaitskill grew up in the 1960s, "emotional" was used as a derogatory noun, as in "She's an emotional."